yours is mine.” She gulped some tea, then rose and stretched, the hem of Ian’s shirt falling nearly to her knees. “What do you find in Altaussee? Where do we go next?”
“Salzburg.” Ian glared. “Give me my shirt back.”
“Nu, ladno.” She shrugged, began unbuttoning.
“Bloody hell,” he growled again and yanked open the door to the tiny washroom. It smelled of peroxide; evidently she’d used the sink to touch up her hair. An improvised laundry line had been hung with a rinsed-out blouse and a set of silky blue knickers. “Your blouse is dry,” Ian said, ignoring the underwear.
“You’re easy to shock, luchik. Is very funny.” She patted his arm, amused, and closed the washroom door. Ian turned to find Tony chortling.
“She collectivized the office,” he said. “Definitely a Russki.”
Ian bit back a snort. The urge to throttle his wife was now warring with the urge to laugh. “Well, help me clear up my Soviet bride’s mess.”
“She was putting files away as she read. It’s not that bad.”
“Without order lies madness.” Ian believed that in his bones. With order came peace and law; without it lay war and blood. He’d seen enough of both to know it was true.
He locked that thought away as Tony sat back on his heels and asked, “When do we head for Salzburg, and are we taking your Soviet bride?”
“I don’t know.” Ian paused. “What does luchik mean?”
Tony grinned. “‘Little ray of sunshine.’”
“Does it bother you that she’s a Soviet?” Ian knew how suspicious the Yanks were of the Reds these days. Five short years from the end of the war, and benevolent ally Uncle Joe had become everyone’s enemy, but the Americans seemed more paranoid about the Communist Menace than anyone.
“She hasn’t gone around quoting Das Kapital. She hasn’t done anything except desecrate your tea and lie about her origins, and there are plenty of reasons for people to do the latter.” Tony slid a cabinet drawer shut. “We listen to lies day in and day out, not just from war criminals. Refugees and good guys lie too. About whether they’re Jewish or gentile, about their war record or their imprisonment record, about their health and their age and how they got their papers. Good reasons or bad, everybody lies.”
“Maybe.” Ian rose. “It’s time I talked to Nina. Will you smooth Frau Hummel over, make sure we aren’t being evicted?”
“Some glamour in this job,” Tony groused amiably, slouching out. “Become a Nazi hunter for the thrills, and it’s all paperwork and sweet-talking the landlady . . .”
Nina padded out of the washroom, tossing Ian’s shirt at his desk and sending more papers to the floor in a shower. Ian ignored that, fixing his wife with a level stare.
“You aren’t Polish. Let’s dispense with that lie first. You’re Russian.”
Nina looked up at him, wariness falling across her face. Then she shrugged. “Yes.”
Ian blinked, so braced for a denial that her acknowledgment caught him off guard. “You aren’t denying it?”
“Why?”
“You told me you were Polish. In the Red Cross hospital—”
“No.” Her eyes were as opaque and bottomless as two blue lakes. “You assumed. I let you.”
He tried to remember. Nineteen forty-five, the steely hospital scent of antiseptic over blood. Nina still half starved and woozy from pneumonia, Ian desperate for answers about his brother. The language barrier, the chaos all around. No, Ian thought, she hadn’t said she was Polish. A girl found near Poznań, with the name Nina, which was so common in Poland . . . everyone assumed. “Why did you let everyone think you were Polish?”
“Easier.” She flopped into his chair, propping her disreputable boots on the desk. “I wasn’t going home. I say I’m Soviet, is where they’d send me.”
“Where is home, exactly?”
“Go east through Siberia until you fall off the world edge into a lake as big as the sky. All taiga and water witches and ice eating railway stations whole; everything needs you dead and everybody wants to leave.” Amusement gleamed in her eyes. “Would you go back?”
“If my family were there.” He’d cross Siberia barefoot if his brother were at the end of it.
“My family isn’t.” If there was pain in her eyes, it flickered by too fast for Ian to catch. “I spend my whole life going as far west as I can from that lake. Poland? Is just the next stop.”
“Dangerous. You were nearly dead when the Red Cross found you.”
“I’m hard to kill.”
Ian pulled up a chair, gazing at Nina across the desk. She gazed back, unblinking.